Creator Jon Braver on Delusion’s future and the return of The Blue Blade

Delusion: The Blue Blade opened in Fall of 2018 in Los Angeles and allowed guests to experience an adventure through time. In the hour-long interactive theater experience, you and your small group are the main characters, and you will need to retrieve an artifact that can alter the course of the future. The adventurers will be transported to many locations and time periods including occupied France during World War II and Romania in the late 1800s. If you missed out last year, don’t worry since Delusion: Blue Blade is back for the 2019 spring season, and the director’s cut will have surprises for new and returning participants. Delusion creator Jon Braver talks about setting expectations for fans who enjoyed the horror shows from the past, why The Blue Blade lends itself to an updated version, time period inspirations and the future of Delusion.

“That began from the very beginning from the very first image,” Braver tells Nerd Reactor about letting people know that Delusion: The Blue Blade is going to be different from its previous shows. “There’s a poster of the Blue Blade with these strange, shadowy creatures in the jungle. It felt very Indiana Jones-like… trying to exude that kind of tone. And then from the beginning, just in the text, we used the word adventure all the time. We’re sort of our own worst enemy in that we have all horror genre for 5 years now and people are expecting it. So I told the whole team from the beginning to be prepared for a bit of a backlash from some people. ‘Oh, it’s not scary enough. I was expecting something scary.’ To me, I love scary stuff but if you like scary stuff, in my mind, you love adventure. If you’re looking to get terrified and scared, just go to a haunted house. If you want people to jump out at you, then go do that.”

That’s not to say that The Blue Blade isn’t creepy.

“People freak out about this so we pull people out if they’re too scared,” Braver explained. “On one hand, it’s super scary, and on the other hand, it’s not scary enough. You can’t please everybody.”

The previous Delusion shows didn’t return with an updated version. With the element of time travel for Delusion: The Blue Blade, it gave Braver wiggle room to alter the story, making the third act even more compelling.

“Those are self-contained stories,” Braver said about the previous shows. “I just didn’t want to touch them. They exist on their own. This one just lends itself to the story of time travel in a very special way. The cool thing about the time traveling, which I’d like to spend more time on, is you do something in this era and it changes this era. And there are a few iterations of the script that I tried that was like, the logistics of Delusion, the format of it proved to be so difficult for the resets. If you make this decision that changes, it was becoming overwhelming that we had to abandon the idea. I love the idea of you making a decision to change things, but I think that would exist better in a different story or movie or something like that. But this one, it didn’t work as well. But we’ll see what happens in the future. I probably won’t touch time travel again for a little bit. Two months I lost myself in this.”

Participants will get to explore different time periods, and Braver explains that he always had in mind to have a World War II setting and a few others.

“I always wanted to visit the whole Raiders homage,” Braver said. “I wanted to get back to the historical fiction 1942 occupied France, Nazi-occupied kind of thing. The upstairs 1885 shifted a bit. I was thinking about 1665 London. There was a great fire there. So that one was originally going to be set in 1665 London, but then that changed to Romania. Everything else started in the present day. As I’m walking through the venue, the 1942 era just spoke to me. That one really feels like it could exist in World War II.”

Delusion is known for having a new show each year during the Halloween season. However, Braver revealed that the future of Delusion is always changing, and he wants to bring the experience to more audiences through different mediums.

“I mean we’re in a bit of a crossroads right now, trying to figure out exactly the next path,” Braver tells our group comprised of media. “Delusion will come back in some iteration or some form, and I’m not exactly sure which yet. I know I wouldn’t want to miss out on the Fall season again, but the year that we took off I enjoyed it immensely. But we’ll see. There’s a lot of plans. One thing I really need to do is to start focusing on bringing these stories out to the mass media. So that was the whole VR aspect of it. It’s in 53 countries right now. The podcast that I’m writing now, that can go anywhere. We love our audiences to death, but we need to build our [audience]. Because if Delusion is going to exist on a grander scale where it’s actually going to provide proper sustainably, financially for myself and my team, it has to grow. It could continue in its current form as long as long as there is an ancillary aspect to it.”